Road accidents involving pedestrians are far more frequent at night than during the day. Worldwide, the number of people killed in road traffic crashes each year is estimated at almost 1.2 million, while the number injured could be as high as 50 million, which is the combined population of five of the world's largest cities. Many of the people killed in such accidents are the pedestrians. The most important factor is the drivers dramatically reduced range of vision. Fewer pedestrians would be killed or seriously injured if vehicles were equipped with improved pedestrian detection systems combined with driver warning strategies.
Some of the inventions which deals with pedestrian detection and tracking known to us are as follows:
U.S. Pat. No. 7,139,411 to Fujimura et al. teaches that a system and method for detecting and tracking as pedestrians, in low visibility conditions or otherwise. A night vision camera periodically captures an infrared image of a road from a single perspective. A pedestrian detection module determines a position of a pedestrian in the frame by processing the captured image. The pedestrian detection module includes a support vector machine to compare information derived from the night vision camera to a training database. A pedestrian tracking module estimates pedestrian movement of the detected pedestrian from in subsequent frames by applying filters. The tracking module uses Kalman filtering to estimate pedestrian movement at periodic times and mean-shifting to adjust the estimation.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,526,102 to Ibrahim Burak Ozer teaches that methods and systems for providing real-time video surveillance of crowded environments. The method consists of several object detection and tracking processes that may be selected automatically to track individual objects or group of objects based on the resolution and occlusion levels in the input videos. Possible objects of interest (OOI) may be human, animals, cars etc. The invention may be used for tracking people in crowded environments or cars in heavy traffic conditions.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,421,091 to Hiroshi Satoh teaches that outputs of pixels present around a given pixel at an image-capturing unit having a plurality of pixels disposed two-dimensionally are added to the output of the given pixel.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,487 to Min-Sub Lee teaches a method for determining feature point for each of the blocks based on the gradient magnitude and variance corresponding to each of the pixels therein.
Most of these known devices, systems and methods use complex methods in order to detect and track pedestrian and are costlier. The accuracy of these methods isn't adequate to detect and track the pedestrian.
Thus, in the light of the above mentioned background of the art, it is evident that, there is a need for a system and method for detecting, classifying and tracking the pedestrian present in front of the vehicle for avoiding collision, which is simple, easy to install and provides higher accuracy at a lower cost.